Mother nature gets a helping hand to nurse

FOR TENS of thousands of years, it was what women did naturally. Yet since breastfeeding fell out of fashion in the 1960s, the health service has faced an uphill struggle to get babies off the bottle. Public health campaigns have long extolled the benefits of breast milk for mother and baby. Infants who are breastfed are protected against a long list of conditions, including diarrhoeal illness, lower respiratory tract infection, middle ear infection, urinary tract infection, and juvenile onset diabetes.

Women who have breastfed experience long-term health benefits, reducing their risk of premenopausal breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and hip fractures in later life.

Despite the mounting evidence in favour of breastfeeding, rates in Scotland have remained stubbornly low. The latest statistics show that the average breastfeeding rate for babies aged six to eight weeks is only 35.9 per cent - well short of the Executive's target of having 50 per cent of mothers breastfeeding by 2005. In Lanarkshire, the rate is as low as 25 per cent.



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